Today's businesses rely significantly on communications and a variety of technologies to access, convey and process information. This need puts a premium on information technology that increases communications speed and bandwidth.
It is well known that fiber optic cable provides significant advantages over its copper cable counterpart. Fiber optic cable has increased capacity and less signal degradation as compared to copper cable, requires less maintenance and is more difficult to tap into. Despite these advantages, most current information technology used for voice and data communications does not require the use of fiber optic cable to interconnect with communications devices, nor do suppliers of such information technology promote use of fiber optic cable. Copper cable manufacturers to-date have had a significant amount of success in improving communications over existing or slightly improved copper cable. As a result, copper cabling has not been a bottleneck in terms of communications speed and bandwidth and therefore, has not been a deciding factor in forcing a move from copper cable to fiber optic cable. Further, since current information technology generally does not require fiber optic cable for high or optimum performance and since applications that require fiber optic cable are limited, the push to move from copper cable to fiber optic cable has been limited notwithstanding the advantages associated with fiber optic cable discussed above.
During construction of new facilities and renovations of older facilities, fiber optic backbones are often installed on the assumption that copper cabling will eventually be replaced with fiber optic cabling. In fact it is anticipated that within the next five (5) to ten (10) years, most communications systems will make use of fiber optic networks that bring fiber to the desk i.e. use fiber optic cable to interconnect communications devices to the backend supporting information technology.
Installing fiber optic cable and components within a premise is a costly investment. These significant costs have made businesses hesitant to convert to fiber optic cable at this time. As will be appreciated, a need therefore exists for a cost effective solution to install fiber optic cable within premises to allow businesses to switch to fiber optic cable now so that they may enjoy the benefits associated with fiber optic cable while facilitating the switch when the change to fiber optic cable becomes necessary.
It is therefore an object of the present invention to provide a novel fiber optic premise wiring system. It is also an object of the present invention to provide a novel system for converting electrical signals to optical signals and back to electrical signals to enable communications devices configured for electrical communications to communicate over a fiber optic link.